1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to a mobile device and particularly to a solution wherein notifications are sent from one mobile device to another to inform a user that another user has arrived.
2. Related Art
Mobile devices are becoming ubiquitous. Children carry them and so do adults. Children use them to ask their parents to come pick them up at a mall or a park. Often parents spend a lot of time trying to locate their child at a mall when they get a call for a ride. Similarly, children wait for a long time outside a mall waiting for their parents to arrive, often in inclement weather. This problem is also faced by mobile users who travel to a new country on business and pleasure and wait for a taxi pickup at an airport, outside an airport or in train stations.
Quite often, a first user and a second user have both GPS enabled devices but one of them cannot easily inform the other user where he/she is currently located or provide directions to the second user that will help the second user meet the first user. When the first user wants the second user to call him/inform him when the second user gets to a specific place in order to provide the first user some time to get ready to meet with him, often the second user is incapable of calling the first user on the phone, especially if he is driving a vehicle. For example, if the second user is expected to call the first user (on a mobile phone) when the first user gets close to a mall, so that the first user, presumably closer to the mall than the second user, can then join the second user at the mall, the second user is incapable or unable to make the call for several reasons, thereby causing confusion and inconvenience to the first user. Similarly, if a first user may want to know if the second user has reached a destination safely and on time, the second user is often incapable or unable to make the call for several reasons, thereby causing confusion and inconvenience to the first user.
If a person wants a ride (in a car, motorcycle etc.) from a friend, the person often has to wait, some times outdoors in inclement weather, to determine if his ride has arrived and to be able to hook up with his friend. Often, the person waiting has no idea when his friend will show up, especially if his friend is held up by traffic. Although his friend could call him on his mobile phone to keep him posted, it requires the ability to operate the mobile phone while driving, which is illegal in quite a few places in the world.
GPS satellites have been used for a while for navigation. GPS satellites do not actually pinpoint your location as is commonly believed. The 24 satellites circling the earth each contain a precise clock that transmits a signal comprising a time to the GPS receiver in a user's mobile device. The mobile device processes the satellite signals to determine geometrically where the user is located. The signals travel at a known speed—the speed of light through outer space, and slightly slower through the atmosphere. The mobile device (or more precisely, a GPS receiver circuitry in the mobile device) uses the arrival time to compute the distance to each satellite, from which it determines the position of the mobile device using geometry and trigonometry. The location of the mobile device is expressed in a specific coordinate system, e.g. latitude/longitude, using the WGS 84 geodetic datum or a local system specific to a country.
When a user makes a request for directions, the signal goes from the user's mobile device/handset through a cell phone tower to a service provider's servers, such as (for example) the TeleNav servers. TeleNav immediately pulls up the relevant maps, businesses, gas prices, etc. and send this information back through the cell phone towers to the user's mobile device.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional and traditional approaches will become apparent to one of ordinary skill in the art through comparison of such systems with the present invention.